Eumachia (1st century AD) was a Roman business entrepreneur and priestess. She served as the public priestess of Venus Pompeiana in Pompeii as well as the matron of the Fullers guild. She is known primarily from inscriptions on a large public building which she financed and dedicated to Pietas and Concordia Augusta.
Name and family
Eumachia was the daughter of Lucius Eumachius, who amassed a large fortune as a manufacturer of bricks, tiles and amphorae. She married Marcus Numistrius Fronto, who may have held the important office of duovir. The Numistrii were one of Pompeii's oldest and most powerful families. All that is certain is that Eumachia was able to use her wealth and social standing to obtain the position of public priestess of the goddess Venus Pompeiana (the city's patron goddess), and she became a successful patronus of the economically significant guild of fullers, the guild which consisted of tanners, dyers and clothing-makers.
Social significance
Eumachia is essential as an example of how a Roman woman of non-imperial/non-aristocratic descent could become an important figure in a community and be involved in public affairs. She is seen as a representative for the increasing involvement of women in politics, using the power of a public priestess, the only political office able to be held by a woman for social mobility. Female patronage of public construction projects was related to priesthoods in Pompeii; these public responsibilities, paired with familial status, may have given women the authority or opportunity to bequest monuments to communities. As priestesses, these women guarded long-held communal traditions. They used their patronage to erect monuments that reflected their or their families' predominance and social standing in the town. In exchange, these prominent patrons were honored with honorific sculptures in life and donations of land for tombs or money for funerals after death. The disparities between Mamia, a 1st-century public priestess in Pompeii from a prominent family in Herculaneum, officially sanctioned tomb, and Eumachia's private tomb show how diverse the social response may be. However, the range of social functions depicted in sculptures of women is more limited: this reflects both their actual place in society and the ideal of womanly behavior (for the elite, at least). The Romans were caught in a bind when publicly displaying their women in portrait statues: The ideal of the sexually faithful, domestically oriented, heir-producing matron, who was reluctant to be seen in public, clashed with the reality of the politically active women of the imperial court and the financially significant female municipal patrons in towns across the empire. Funerary inscriptions emphasize women's domestic and familial values: chastity, material fidelity, wifely and motherly devotion, and attention to household chores.
Building of Eumachia
The building of Eumachia, the largest building near the forum of Pompeii, is commonly broken down into three parts, the chalcidicum, the porticus, and the crypta. The chalcidicum encompasses the front of the building and is an important part of the continuous portico running along the east of the forum. The porticus is a four-sided colonnade surrounding a large courtyard. Finally, the crypta is a large corridor behind the porticus on the north east and south sides, separated from the porticus by a single wall that has windows that were probably once shuttered, in earlier descriptions, there were even cisterns, vats, basins, and stone tables in the courtyard. In the center of the court yard, that is said to have been paved of stone slabs, there is a stone block with an iron ring that covered an underground cistern. The dating for the building is somewhat vague, coming in somewhere between 9 BC and 22 AD. A Marcus Numistrius Fronto had a post-mortem inscription dedicated to him on the building, and he held the office of duumvir in 3 AD. For this reason it is believed that he was more likely to have been Eumachia's husband rather than her son, at the same time, there is an idealized statue of Eumachia dressed in a tunic, stola, and cloak in a niche toward the back of the building.